Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon<\/p>\n
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists … it is real … it is possible … it’s yours.” – Ayn Rand<\/p>\n
Sounds pretty good at the start, doesn’t it?\u00a0 Don’t let your fire go out?\u00a0 Even the hero in the soul could be an archetypal reference, one that is pro-Self.\u00a0 Then, Rand goes completely off the rails.\u00a0 Lonely isolation because the life you deserved has been beyond reach.\u00a0 The world you desire can be won.\u00a0 It exists and so on.\u00a0 This is the most specious sort of pseudo-logic.<\/p>\n
First of all.\u00a0 Life you deserve?\u00a0 Oh, who said?\u00a0 There is no metaphysical realm filled with wonderful fulfilling lives created especially for you and your desires.\u00a0 That’s simply a happy talk version of heaven, the old pie in the sky idea, just not when you die, but delivered now, right now.\u00a0 Fast food, fast destiny.\u00a0 Delivered to your home.<\/p>\n
A world you’ve never been able to reach?\u00a0 So.\u00a0 If you haven’t reached it yet, why not?\u00a0 Because you haven’t believed in it enough?\u00a0 Because you don’t have the right gender, color, sexual preference?\u00a0 Could it be that the life you want and don’t have is one fed into the culture by vapid self-help gurus like Ayn Rand?\u00a0 Who says you can have whatever you want?\u00a0 What’s good about that?\u00a0 That’s the adolescent girl screaming at a rock concert or an adolescent boy watching hockey or football, pumping his fist and imagining.\u00a0 Is it possible that the dream you have is not your dream, but the dream of a culture with achievement as its number one value?<\/p>\n
I’m no stranger to this thought.\u00a0 I dreamed of becoming a published author, admired for my prose and my inventive fiction.\u00a0 I wanted it.\u00a0 I haven’t got it.\u00a0 Is my life over because I don’t have what I dreamed?\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 My dream, and others I’ve had like it, came into my Self via a male focused culture, one that said, Be all you can be.\u00a0 You can do anything.\u00a0 B.S.<\/p>\n
I can’t, for example, run a 4:00 minute mile.\u00a0 I can’t, for example solve Fourier Transformations.\u00a0 I can’t paint the next great American painting nor am I able to put on a white coat and figure out what’s the matter with you.\u00a0 Would I like to be able to do these things?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Is not desiring them what puts them beyond my reach?\u00a0 No. It’s my limitedness, the peculiar package of skills and abilities I had from birth and have accrued over years of life experience.<\/p>\n
We each have limitations; they make us unique.\u00a0 The trick is not desiring a life you “deserve”, it is finding the life that only you can live, the peculiar, one-off life you have to offer to the world and to the rest of us.\u00a0 The big difference here is the inward look goes toward self-knowledge, toward humility, toward knowing what only you can do.\u00a0 This boot-strap, Horatio Alger, American mobility notion only pulls you further and further away from self-knowledge.\u00a0 Instead, your life becomes an attempt to shoe-horn yourself into a cultural vessel, one not designed for you, not at all, but one designed to keep the culture moving in the direction it knows.<\/p>\n
You are different.\u00a0 You deserve nothing.\u00a0 The hero in your soul will not perish in lonely isolation because you don’t get what you deserve.\u00a0 The hero in your soul perishes when it uses its power and energy to cram you into somebody elses version of what you deserve.<\/p>\n
In summary:\u00a0 I don’t like Ayn Rand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you … Continue reading I Shrugged<\/span>